My father died so young (at age 49), I hardly got to know the man.

When I was young, he worked all the time. When I was young I knew only his authority. It made me feel secure and it scared me. I suppose that is because I understood his authority as a weapon.

My father struggled with an explosive personality, something I am told he inherited from his grandmother. On more than one occasion I saw him use his temper to reinforce his will as the boss or the head of the family. Don’t get me wrong I was never abused. He never hit my mother or me or my sister. I was just always aware of an anger in him boiling somewhere just below the surface. I wanted to stay away from it.

I suppose that is why I fell down the tunnel of imagination. I learned to hide in stories. Some I read, some I made up, but most of my young life I was more inside my head than I was in the outside world. I kept those psychic walls up throughout my childhood. I didn’t have my father’s forceful personality, but I learned how to do weird as well as he did angry and that became my defense, and a wall of separation between me and….well almost everyone.

My father and I were just coming to an easy peace, when he suddenly passed away. I think I was just beginning to learn about the sources of his anger and he was just beginning to understand the gates that would get him through my weirdness when we ran out of time.

Still and all, I am glad that I was a part of his life when he went. I realize while I did not have as much time as I would have liked, we did have time. I had come home. I had begun to learn how to stop isolating from him and we were working together when his time came. We had begun to share our adult selves. I think given more time we would probably have become good friends.